The following MBW op/ed comes from Diana Umana (pictured inset), a writer who has spent recent years interviewing artists in and around hip-hop’s underground.
Below, she argues that cultural relevance in hip-hop has decoupled from mainstream scale – and that the artists proving it are reshaping where the industry should be looking…
When Nas declared Hip Hop Is Dead in 2006, he was mourning a culture he believed had sold its soul to commerce. Twenty years later, the genre looks dead by a different metric entirely: in late October 2025, for the first time since February 1990, not a single rap song sat in the Billboard Hot 100’s top 40.
Hip-hop’s overall US market share, which peaked near 30% in 2020, has slipped to roughly 24%. But anyone reading those numbers as an obituary is looking in the wrong place. Rap didn’t die. It decentralized.
Because at the very moment rap is receding from the commercial center, its cultural influence has never been more total – it’s on the Gucci runway, in the Jordan Brand boardroom, and threaded through the aesthetics of nearly every scene that matters to anyone under thirty-five.
The chart number is falling. The cultural footprint is expanding. And what may seem like contradictory occurrences is rather a corollary shift seen from two sides.
What Drake’s Molly Santana co-sign actually tells us
Here’s how it looks up close: Just the other month, May 2026, Drake featured Molly Santana on the ICEMAN track, Ran To Atlanta, alongside Future. It’s worth sitting with why that pairing made sense for him.
Drake’s most durable skill across 15 years at the top has never been simply making hits – it’s his ear for talent at the edges, the instinct to partner with artists just before, or just as, they break: GIVĒON, Tems, Meek Mill, Bad Bunny, and now Molly Santana, who recorded her last album in a rented Airbnb in Wyoming and attracted millions of monthly listeners on Spotify after the feature.
Drake’s superstardom has always been partly built on his antenna for what’s happening in the margins. The Molly feature is the most current expression of it.
I’ve spent the last few years interviewing artists in and around this scene, and the pattern underneath that feature is the real story: for Gen Z hip-hop, cultural relevance has decoupled from mainstream scale.
The young rappers exerting the most influence on sound, fashion, and the wider culture are frequently not the ones with the biggest numbers. They operate from what the industry still files under “underground,” and their cultural weight runs well ahead of what their streaming and social media totals alone would predict.
When monoculture broke, niche became the whole game
MIDiA Research, which called niche becoming the “new mainstream” back in 2019, now argues the dynamic has inverted so completely that mainstream itself has become niche. The numbers are stark: the best-selling albums of the CD era reached double-digit percentages of the entire US population – the Eagles’ greatest-hits set and Michael Jackson’s Thriller were bought by roughly 17% and 16% of Americans respectively – while Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, the biggest release of its moment, reached under 1%. Everything “big” these days has gotten considerably smaller (even the biggest).
“The monocultural superstar, the artist everyone is paying attention to, became impossible to manufacture by design.”
Rap itself overtook rock as America’s most popular genre nearly a decade ago, propelled in part by being cast as the fresh, defining sound of its moment; it’s now fragmenting along the same lines rock did, its energy migrating away from a unified chart-topping center and into a constellation of scenes. When monoculture fractures like that, the incentive flips: the most valuable thing an artist can do is no longer to chase the widest possible audience, but to own a specific one completely.
It wasn’t always like this. The Drake, Kendrick, and Cole “Big 3” era was the last time scale and relevance were fully aligned. They didn’t just sell the most; they defined the culture, its commercial and creative center at once. To matter, you aimed for that. Streaming dismantled the arrangement, splintering listening into thousands of self-contained scenes – and the monocultural superstar, the artist everyone is paying attention to simultaneously, became close to impossible to manufacture by design.
From Future to Carti: how Whole Lotta Red became the new blueprint
The lineage that filled the vacuum runs through Future, the great godfather of this sound, whose melodic phrasing and emotional register sit underneath nearly everything the new generation makes. Playboi Carti is its direct godfather – and the throughline is more specific than it’s usually given credit for.
When Whole Lotta Red arrived in 2020, it was widely panned and misunderstood, dismissed as abrasive and unfinished by rap purists. It has since become the new blueprint: the distorted textures, the vampiric aesthetic, the refusal to translate himself for casual listeners are the exact qualities artists like Molly Santana, Che, and OsamaSon built careers on.
Instead of chasing the center, WLR created a new edge, and an entire generation moved toward it and spawned from it. That Future and Carti became bona fide superstars anyway is the point – they built a new lane rather than narrowing themselves to fit the old one.
A3C, Atlantic, and the airwaves
I’ve had a front-row seat to how early this starts. I first saw Playboi Carti live at A3C in Atlanta in 2017 – the same summer Magnolia took over New York. The then 21-year-old, who was deemed the flavor of the month to others, was a superstar to me; he’d go on to redraw the genre’s aesthetic from a place no major-label A&R department saw coming. The instinct doesn’t fade. Just last year I interviewed Molly Santana at Summer Smash, and it was obvious then that she had what it took to take over – well before the Drake feature made it official.
That same eye keeps pointing the same direction: toward artists the industry hasn’t caught up to yet. Take Jack Harlow, who I also caught live early at A3C in 2017, but not on the main stage like Carti; instead he crushed it with the showmanship of an arena artist at a showcase that couldn’t have had more than 50 people in the room. This was about a year before he signed to Generation Now, the Don Cannon, Leighton ‘Lakeshow’ Morrison, and DJ Drama joint venture with Atlantic that had developed Lil Uzi Vert (another example of a niche rapper gone global).
That same label now has Kai Ca$h, a Brooklyn lyricist running it up in New York, winning over the kind of purist hip-hop critics who don’t hand respect out easily. This is a proven pipeline, and it almost never runs through radio first.
On the flip side, when a fan recently asked where her arena-filling audience had gone, Grammy-winning, multi-Platinum, Billboard-charting singer and emcee Lizzo answered plainly that “streaming replaced radio, and I was a radio darling” – that radio was how her fans had found her in the first place. It’s a candid admission of a lever that simply isn’t available to most of these underground acts, and one they’re thriving without.
OsamaSon, Nettspend, and the numbers the majors can’t manufacture
Consider OsamaSon, the Goose Creek, South Carolina rapper who handed advance copies of his album to journalists on sharpie-labeled burned CDs to stop leaks. His October 2025 album Psykotic pulled roughly 5 million first-day Spotify streams and debuted at No. 81 on the Billboard 200 (a 70-spot jump from Jump Out‘s No. 151 just nine months earlier) without a major co-sign. He reached two million monthly listeners on Christmas Eve with no editorial playlist push behind him, numbers that outpace plenty of radio-backed major-label signings on day one. In June 2026, he confirmed on Instagram that he’d signed a brand deal with Jordan Brand.
“At the very moment rap is receding from the commercial center, its cultural influence has never been more total.”
Or take Nettspend, the Virginia teenager deemed a rage-rap Kurt Cobain whose snarl made him a SoundCloud folk hero. He crossed two million monthly Spotify listeners for the first time in March 2026. Then you have underground punk princess Molly Santana co-headlining a fourteen-date North American tour with North West this August. And when Demna staged his debut as creative director of Gucci, two of the faces he chose to walk it were rapidly rising UK star fakemink and Nettspend, rappers whose mainstream radio footprint rounds to zero.
Several of these artists carry major-label ties: OsamaSon through Atlantic, Nettspend’s recent releases via Interscope, while Molly Santana went the other way, exiting her Capitol deal to go independent just before the Drake feature sent her supernova. In nearly every case, the underground built the artist first, and the major arrived afterward, as a distribution partner; it was not the A&R engine that discovered, molded, and packaged them. The cultural capital originated at the edges; the institutional money followed it there.
It’s worth remembering that 96% of daily uploads to streaming services (source: Luminate) now come from independent artists, not majors. A heritage sportswear giant, a luxury house at its highest-stakes moment, and rap’s most strategic superstar are all reaching directly toward this scene, while the discovery apparatus that labels are actually built to operate sits mostly downstream of the fans.
Why depth is the fastest-growing money in music
Breadth is over. MIDiA’s 2026 research found that “expanded rights” – labels’ cut of live and merch – grew 21.5% in 2025, outpacing every other revenue segment, and that hip-hop and R&B occupy a rare “sweet spot”: more than half of merch, physical, and ticket buyers count themselves fans, and they spend above average. Hip-hop is already the most popular genre among 16-to-19-year-olds.
Luminate’s own year-end read of 2025 lands in the same place, reporting that superfans are nearly twice as likely to buy subscriptions, merch, and tickets, and concluding flatly that “the path to success is no longer about wide, shallow reach”. The dense, committed fandoms these artists command are precisely the audiences that convert into the fastest-growing money in the business.
Even zillennial stars are reaching for the edges
None of this means the mass-appeal center is dead, and it isn’t a clean reversal. But look at two of its biggest zillennial occupants. Both Doja Cat and Jack Harlow reached genuine mass superstardom – Doja with Planet Her, Harlow on Come Home The Kids Miss You and Diamond-certified single WHATS POPPIN. And both have since pivoted toward more left-of-center territory, almost in rebellion against the very qualities that made them broadly popular.
Doja leaned further into the esoteric: her first-week sales have stepped down as her sound has gotten more idiosyncratic – Planet Her (109,000 units) to Scarlet (72,000) to 2025’s funk- and jazz-inflected, ’80s-indebted Vie (57,000) – yet Vie is her best-reviewed album to date, and she navigated this evolution on her own terms. A turning point was her Scarlet-themed arena shows – which largely featured one ‘look’, most of her own stunts, and no maximalist staging required.
“The most important thing an artist can do is double down on what makes them singular.”
Harlow’s was a slower, more studied turn: Monica, his neo-soul-leaning 2026 LP, drew mixed reviews and his lowest first-week sales yet, but the rollout was the most unique of his career – a weekly film series at New York’s Roxy Cinema drawn from the movies he watched making the record, conversations with Criterion and Climax Books, an intimate jazz-club show, and a book giveaway with McNally Jackson in Soho that wrapped around several blocks. Neither is topping the charts. Both are choosing artistic specificity over commercial maximization – and when the artists who won the old game start reaching toward the edges for credibility, it tells you where credibility now lives.
That’s a shift worth pricing in. The industry still signs, budgets, and measures as though it’s hunting for the next Big Three – the broadest reach, the radio add, the artist who can be everything to everyone. But the monoculture that made that bet rational is gone, and in its absence the most important thing an artist can do is double down on what makes them singular.
Cultural gravity has moved toward artists with smaller, denser audiences: fans who stream a whole catalog on repeat, turn up to every tour date, and treat the artist as theirs. That depth converts into sold-out rooms, brand deals, and the kind of influence that pulls a Drake feature or a Gucci casting in ways a shallow pool of passive streams never has. The most useful question in hip-hop right now isn’t who’s on top of the charts. It’s who’s filling a void no one had named yet.
All MBW+ subscribers get digital access to our Music Business Worldwide magazine, with six issues released each year. Music Business Worldwide
